The Secret Peach
I remember the pale peaches of Cathcartvale:
light down as of a cheek
and the wet white flesh, firm to the bite.
Sweet fibre of peach in your teeth
and the pinkening fruit at the rosy, wrinkled pip.
Rarer than the golden peaches
halved and boiled and syrup-drowned,
home-bottled, seldom from the shop.
A Consol jar of peaches and a tin of Ideal Milk
for pudding after school:
peaches-and-cream of the everyday.
Aunty Anna’s jars were the ones
with the peaches all sliced up.
But the white ones we ate fresh.
The trees were in the orchard by the house,
where the hanslammertjies were kept.
Peach blossom and fattening fruit
and rescued lambs.
Soft, milky noses and remembered nectar
and a farm now lost.
Do the trees still stand?
Is there someone there who picks the fruit?
An old woman fading in a foreign land
will thirst for that particular juice,
will call out for it, searching
for the peach’s proper name,
forgetting that she ate, we ate,
the peaches from those trees each year
and never knew it written down,
in any of our languages.
Isobel Dixon grew up in South Africa, where her debut, Weather Eye, won the Olive Schreiner Prize. Read more.
“The Secret Peach” reprinted from A Whistling of Birds by Isobel Dixon (Nine Arches Press, 2023).